


Bond

by aww_writing_no



Series: Winterhawk Week 2019 [3]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2020-10-27 02:43:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20753021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aww_writing_no/pseuds/aww_writing_no
Summary: When Bucky walks in to Strike Bean Delta for the first time, Clint feels an immediate bond. He's not sure what to make of it.For Winterhawk Week Day Three





	1. Chapter 1

Clint looked up from the cash register at Strike Bean Delta when he heard the door open and a cacophony of voices filled the small shop. Things had been quiet this morning, but with the new recruits arriving at Camp Lehigh today he hadn’t expected it to stay that way for long. 

Sometimes Clint hated being right. 

A whole pack of rowdy young men in army fatigues jostled for space as they stared at the menu above Clint’s head. He was about to roll his eyes at their ridiculous posturing when he laid eyes on one of them and felt a sharp pang of - something. 

There was nothing particularly remarkable about him. Grey-blue eyes and brown hair cropped army regulation short, he looked the same as half the kids who came through here for training. Yet Clint felt an immediate bond. Not lust. Definitely not lust, but more like… an old, comfortable friendship. Which was ridiculous because they’d never met before. 

When grey-blue eyes came up to the counter to place his order - medium dark-roast with extra room for cream - he paused, hand in the air and blinking slowly as he went to hand Clint his money. He shook his head slightly before asking, “Have we met?” 

Clint took the money and counted back his change before replying, “I don’t think so”. 

He seemed as confused as Clint, but didn’t press it, walking away to let Clint take the next order. On his way out he stuffed a five dollar bill in the tip jar, which seemed to indicate something, though Clint had no idea what it could be. 

Like many of the new recruits, grey-blue eyes became a regular over the next few months. Strike Bean Delta was the closest coffeeshop to the base, and got a steady stream of business from army folk who quickly tired of whatever institutional swill they served in the mess hall. 

With time Clint learned his name was James, but he went by Bucky of all things. He learned that he was eighteen, fresh out of high school, and had enlisted with his best friend Steve. He had big plans for when he got out of the army, most of which involved going to school and getting some kind of advanced science degree. He took his coffee with a frankly obscene amount of cream and sugar, and had a penchant for apricot cheese danishes. 

Basically, he was nothing like Clint. 

Clint took his coffee black, and often straight from the pot when he wasn’t working. He wasn’t a big fan of pastry, possibly because only ate them when they were stale - two days old and unfit to sell to customers, even at a discount. Technically he was supposed to throw them out, but he wasn’t about to go wasting food that was still edible. 

Clint had dropped out of high school at sixteen and immediately started doing whatever it took to keep food on the table. You know, when he managed to find a place that actually had a table. He was living on the street and had started getting into some real shady shit when he’d been approached by a guy who did outreach for a youth shelter. Somehow between Nick and Phil and the other counselors at SHIELD (Shelter for Homeless something or other - Clint could never remember the full name) they managed to help him get his life back on track. They weren’t good tracks. They were rusty and uneven and usually full of giant splinters, but they were his tracks all the same. 

When Bucky told him he’d been assigned to a unit and would be shipping out the next day, Clint told him to stay safe and impulsively scrawled his phone number on the side of Bucky’s cup. Bucky stuffed a twenty dollar bill in the tip jar on his way out. 

Clint got a text from an unfamiliar number a couple weeks later. It had a picture of the most dilapidated coffeemaker Clint had ever seen, and looked like it had been set up on a stack of crates in some kind of tent. The text read “I’d kill for a cold brew right now. -Bucky”. 

Clint laughed and sent back a picture of the fruit danishes in the display case. 

“Fuck, I’d kill for those too,” was the reply. 

They’d been texting on and off for close to a year - mostly idle chatter and pictures of deserts and humvees (Bucky) or coffee and dogs (Clint) - when Clint woke up screaming in the middle of the night, feeling like his arm was on fire. 

“What’s going on with your arm?” Natasha asked him later that day. 

Clint shook out his arm for what felt like the millionth time, wishing the pins and needles feeling would go away. He really didn’t want to drop a pot of hot coffee on himself today. It wouldn’t be the first time, but he tried not to make a habit out of it. “I probably just slept on it wrong,” he told her. 

Weeks later, his arm was still giving him problems. 

“Go see a doctor; you probably have a pinched nerve,” Natasha told him. 

“A doctor? Who can afford that?” he asked. Health insurance was for people with Real Jobs. He worked at a coffee shop. Besides, he was more worried about the fact he’d sent Bucky a picture of the cutest samoyed he’d ever seen and Bucky still hadn’t responded. One time he’d sent back a picture of one of the bomb sniffer dogs, and Clint still wasn’t over the cuteness of the german shepherd in its little vest and goggles. Clint wasn’t too proud to admit he was hoping for a reprise. 

When Bucky stepped into Strike Bean Delta almost six months later, Clint wouldn’t have recognised him if he hadn’t felt that sharp pang of something when he walked in the door. 

Bucky was wearing civvies, long hair tied up in a messy half-bun, and a lot more shadows under his eyes than when he’d left. Most notably, though, was the distinct lack of a left arm. 

Clint’s own arm went numb at the sight, and the blender he was holding fell to the ground with a loud crash. Strawberry-banana smoothie coated his shoes and oozed slowly across the floor. 

“Aww, smoothie, no,” he whined, and a wet towel hit him in the face, courtesy of Natasha. 

Cleaning up the smoothie gave him plenty of time to try to sort through his feelings, because he was having a lot of them. Like, a LOT of them. By the time he finished cleaning up his mess, his feelings still weren’t sorted, but Bucky was sitting awkwardly at one of the tables with a coffee in front of him. 

“Talk to him,” Natasha said, forcing a plate with an apricot cheese danish into his hands. “Don’t drop it,” she added a second later. 

“But Nat,” he whined, sneaking a glance at Bucky who was staring into his coffee like it held the secrets of the universe. 

“Talk. To. Him,” she repeated, turning Clint around by the shoulders and giving him a literal shove in the right direction. 

“Uhh, I’m glad you’re back,” Clint said, sliding the plate in front of Bucky and taking the seat across from him. He nodded at the missing arm. “I’m guessing that’s why I stopped getting pictures of cute dogs in uniform?” 

Bucky looked surprised, then let out a sharp bark of laughter. “Doctors tend to frown on having animals in the ICU,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d be interested in pictures of cups of jello.” 

Clint smiled, nervousness relaxing into a feeling of ease he seldom felt with other people. He rubbed his left arm unconsciously, telling Bucky, “You’d be surprised.” 

That got another laugh out of him and Bucky’s shoulders relaxed as he reached over to take a bite out of the danish. “Oh man, I’ve wanted this for so long” he said, tipping his head back and closing his eyes briefly. “You do not know how many nights I dreamed about coming back here just to eat one of these things.” 

Clint remembered all the times he’d had an unexpected pastry craving over the past few months and thought that maybe he did. 

“Who are you?” he asked abruptly. As soon as the words left his mouth Clint realized how crazy he must sound, but judging by the look Bucky leveled at him, he knew exactly what Clint was asking. 

Bucky took another bite out of the danish and chewed slowly, looking Clint over as if he didn’t know quite what to do with him. “I suppose I could ask you the same question,” he drawled as he finished chewing. “Who’s the mysterious barista that keeps showing up in my dreams?” 

“You dream about me?” Clint asked. 

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “You don’t?”

Clint shook his head. “No, not really. I just get these… I dunno, feelings? I don’t know how to explain it. I’m pretty sure I felt when you lost your arm.” 

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Bucky said, clearly startled. “That’s- that’s so messed up. I’m really sorry.” 

“Don’t be,” Clint said with a shrug. It wasn’t like he had any control over it - like either of them had any control over whatever the heck this was. “Still doesn’t answer my question, though.” 

“Last week I dreamt you lost your keys. You thought you’d dropped them on the subway and you had to have the neighbor let you in,” he told Clint, eyes seemingly focused somewhere past Clint’s left ear. “Last month I dreamt you were at a gun range, except you were hitting the targets using a bow and arrows. Last year when I was deployed I dreamt about you making coffee more times than I could count. One time you were making it while wearing a crocodile costume. I thought I was just missing home, but now? I don’t know.” 

Clint put his head in his hands as Bucky continued to stare off into space. He should probably be getting back to work soon, but this was too weird for words. He’d definitely done all of those things in real life. “It wasn’t a crocodile costume,” he said finally, at a loss for anything better to say. “It was Abigail the Alligator, the mascot for the sporting goods shop I buy my arrows from. They booked a coffee service for a special event, and they offered me a bonus for wearing the costume.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple months back I asked [Bedlamwolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bedlamwolf/pseuds/Bedlamwolf) for a prompt and she requested an addition to "the coffeeshop AU". 
> 
> I think she was hoping for fluff and I really did NOT deliver. Sorry, Bedlam.

“ _ You need to stop locking yourself out of your apartment, _ ” read Clint’s text from Bucky. 

“ _ You need to stop dreaming about me like a creeper, _ ” Clint replied, knowing full well Bucky wasn’t doing it on purpose. But it wasn’t like he was locking his keys inside the apartment on purpose either. “ _ Why can’t you make yourself useful and dream about me in real time? _ ” he added. 

“ _ You think I want three dreams a week about you losing your keys? _ ” came the response from Bucky. “ _ You need to step it up and add some variety in your life. My dreams are boring as hell thanks to you _ .” 

Oh gee, thanks, Clint thought grumpily. He needed to live a more exciting life just so Bucky had more interesting dreams through the weird telepathic thing they had going on. Why did this stuff always happen to him? 

It wasn’t like he’d asked for this. Wasn’t like either of them had asked for this. But one day an Army recruit named Bucky had walked into Strike Bean Delta and life wasn’t the same for either of them ever again. 

For Clint it was mostly feelings. It had started with a strange comfortable feeling whenever Bucky was around, but grew into something more inexplicable. At first he didn’t understand the sudden food cravings, or the seemingly rapid mood changes, or that one time he woke up feeling like his arm was on fire. 

But then Bucky had shown back up in the coffeeshop missing an arm and, well, it hadn’t explained everything but it had explained a lot. 

For Bucky it was always dreams and the dreams were always real. He dreamt of Clint working in the coffeeshop, he dreamt of Clint in the archery range, and apparently he dreamt a lot about Clint losing his keys. 

It wasn’t Clint’s fault that keys were small and fiddly and so easy to lose. 

“ _ I’m sorry I don’t lead a more glamorous life, _ ” he finally texted back. “ _ I’ll take up superheroing in my spare time for your amusement, shall I? _ ” 

“ _ That’d be great _ ,” came the quick reply. Bucky was probably sitting on his couch at home with nothing better to do than harass Clint when he was supposed to be getting ready for work. Clint’s phone dinged again as he was pulling the uniform polo over his head. “ _ Can I join you? _ ” 

Clint shook his head in amusement. “ _ What’s the point of dreaming about it if you were there too? _ ” 

“ _ It’d still be better than some of my dreams, _ ” Bucky told him, and yeah, Clint knew. 

Clint knew when Bucky was having dreams that weren’t about him because he woke up in a cold terror too. He knew that leaden feeling of panic and dread, but he also knew it wasn’t his own. Those were the mornings he dropped half the things he held in his left hand, and it happened often enough he’d learned to get through his morning routine one-handed. Those were the mornings Natasha forced him to work the cash register, tired of the amount of coffee he had to remake when he forgot and dropped another cup on the floor. 

“ _ Yeah, I know, lost keys are boring, _ ” he replied, deliberately misunderstanding. “ _ I gotta head out to work now _ ,” he added. 

“ _ DON’T LEAVE YOUR KEYS! _ ” 

*

Clint was on his way home from work, very proud of remembering his keys for once, when something slammed into him from behind as he was crossing the street. He was thrown forward at an awkward angle, and thought “fuckin’ ow” before everything faded into a muted collage of pain and shouting and bright lights. 

When he woke up, Clint felt a familiar flood of anxiety that wasn’t his own. Aww, man, Bucky must’ve had another nightmare. He reached over to grab his phone off the nightstand and he felt a sharp pang of relief and affection and why did his leg hurt so much? 

Clint opened his eyes to see Bucky’s face staring down at him. 

“Whu-?” he asked, blinking. This couldn’t be right. Bucky didn’t know where he lived, much less have keys to his apartment. Keys he’d actually - wait. He didn’t remember getting home. The last thing he remembered was something hitting him as he crossed the - oh. Oh. He’d been hit by a car, hadn’t he? 

“Hey Clint,” Bucky said in a soothing voice. “How are you feeling?” 

“Mmmm, worry,” Clint mumbled, reaching up to pat Bucky’s cheek. After his initial relief, Bucky was projecting all kinds of nervousness and Clint couldn’t be having that. “I’m fine, no need to worry.” 

Clint felt a surge of surprise that faded back into concern. 

“Do you remember what happened?” 

Clint started to nod, but it made his head feel all wobbly. “I got hit by a car?” he asked, hazarding his best guess. He was pretty clearly in a hospital, and  _ something _ had hit him from behind, so unless there were like, bands of marauding rugby players wandering around New Jersey attacking people, it was a pretty solid guess. 

Bucky nodded, reaching his hand out as if to touch Clint but pulling back before he reached him. “Yeah,” he murmured, a soft wave of grief washing over Clint. “It was a hit and run. You broke your leg in three places.” 

“Mmm, that checks out then.” Clint paused. “Wait, why are  _ you _ here?” 

He was pretty sure Natasha was listed as his emergency contact. It might have been Coulson, but he was pretty sure he’d changed it to Nat last year. There was no reason Bucky should have been contacted. 

“I had a dream,” Bucky said raggedly, and for the first time Clint noticed how tired he looked. “I saw you get hit by a car and -” 

The jolt of sheer terror that went through Clint was so strong he gasped. It was as bad as any of the nightmares he’d felt from Bucky and he’d caused that. He’d done that to Bucky. 

“Fuck I’m so sorry,” he blurted out, and reached out to grab Bucky’s hand. Bucky latched on to it like a lifeline and Clint processed the other part of what he’d said. “Wait, you dreamed about me again? What day is it?” 

“Tuesday, why?” 

“I need to get to work!” Clint yelped, the terror flooding through him now his own. He was struggling to sit up when Bucky shoved him back down and kept a steady pressure on his chest to pin him in place. 

“Clint,” Bucky growed, anger and frustation surging through Clint as he spoke, “you have pins in your leg. You are not going to work.” 

“But I’ve got the lunch shift!” Clint told him, panicking. What with his bad tendency to oversleep, he’d been on his final warning for years. He couldn’t lose this job. He was gonna have all kinds of medical bills to pay after this, and he really really didn’t want to end up back on the street. 

Bucky sighed, frustration cutting through Clint’s panic. “I called the coffeeshop; will you please calm the fuck down? They’re getting people to cover your shifts.” 

“Oh.” That was good. They probably wouldn’t fire him then. “Uhh, thanks.” 

“Don’t mention it,” Bucky said with another sigh, releasing his hand from Clint’s chest and sinking into the chair next to the hospital bed. “I take it back.” 

Clint twisted his head to look at Bucky. “Take what back?” 

“Wanting more interesting dreams. Please go back to losing your keys. This wasn’t what I meant.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yup, I've written my first coffeeshop AU. 
> 
> I have a feeling it won't be the last.


End file.
